Morning hit, but the sun was missing. It just wasn't there. The sky looked like a ceiling that had finally snapped. It buckled under an invisible weight. A heavy hand shoving your shoulders down, making your knees want to touch the dirt. No one knew why. Nobody even had the breath left to ask.
It wasn't weather. I've seen bad storms before, but this was a different kind of disaster, something very unique and special. No wind. No rain. No smell of dust or ozone—just an absurd emptiness, a rip. A giant, ugly hole in the middle of everything that seemed to foreshadow the end of the world—and maybe of all worlds and all existence.
"To be real, it looked like someone had carved the end of the world right into the sky—the actual apocalypse, staring us in the face.
We just stood there. Middle of the street, necks cramping, scared out of our wits. We were waiting for a bang, a scream, a roar from the clouds—anything. But nothing happened. Not a damn thing. It was just quiet. A haunting, heavy silence that felt like a grave. It was horrible, unlike anything I'd ever seen, but at the same time? It was strangely beautiful. You couldn't look away.
I felt terrified, sure, but there wasn't any real fear left in me. Just this constant, full sensation, like an essence was taking over everything. This vacuum was swallowing the world and stealing every bit of who I was. It was so stupidly absurd that it felt like neither life nor death could actually survive it.
The silence was so thick it made my ears throb with pain, even though I couldn't really feel my own body anymore. Not the pain, not even my own ears. It was a pressure that made me want to rip my head off. It felt like a fever of madness or some deep-seated terror crawling out from the bottom of my soul, from the very core of whatever I am.
It felt like a hand had reached down and snatched every sound out of the world. Maybe some massive beast from the old myths. But I've never heard a legend about something this messed up, something so terrible that just by being there it denied everything—the dirt, the stars, gravity, and every law we thought mattered.
Even pain, emotions, thoughts—everything seemed terribly obscured and absent. Even while thinking about all this, I didn't feel my own thoughts; they seemed to disappear from my mind with every new piece of information I glimpsed—an erasure, perhaps, of all reality or even of the beyond.
Nothing made sense. Nothing happening was understandable. Just waiting for the end, helpless—an overwhelming and terrible sensation, far beyond what any battle against any enemy could aspire to be. Whatever it was, it caused something in every creature existing in the world at that moment: a persistent feeling of inferiority, destined never to be forgotten, even if it couldn't be fully remembered, not even by the most powerful.
After all, even those who kept memories of the event and gave it a name couldn't achieve much more than that: conserving mere memories of fragments of what occurred, at least the parts that their powerful existences could endure knowing and keeping without breaking and shattering like an old vase. That was their limit, even if some among those few extremely powerful beings remembered more.
Then, the air died.
But the crazy part? No one choked. Humans, angels, demons—no one! We simply stopped breathing. It was absolutely horrible. Lungs went cold. No air to go in, no air to go out. Just like that, suddenly. We were caught in a glitch, as if we had entered another dimension of the universe or as if the veil of the end times had suddenly fallen to reap every life in the world. Stuck between a heartbeat and a grave. The world hadn't just changed. It shattered. And we were still standing on the wreckage, helpless.
It was a birth more impressive than any other already seen—perhaps since the Primordials, who were considered the true gods, the first original beings who later created, as the legends say, the levels.
It just happened. A raw thing, nameless, that spat on every rule the Creators had spent years whining about, as if it effortlessly trampled every limit of the world, every fragment of reality's impossible. In one second, the future vanished. Every prophecy was just a grey smear on a blank map.
Next came the colors. I looked at my hands, terrified. The skin was grey, like ash. The trees looked like charcoal sketches. Most people just stared like idiots at the person next to them. Their minds weren't prepared for such an impactful truth. It was like trying to compress the whole ocean into a tiny tea cup. The cup just breaks. Everyone would forget what they were seeing, paralyzed in shock in the seconds following the start—and me too.
Only a few—those with the right blood or an unshakeable will—could even look at it. These few chosen ones, of unimaginable power, called it:
THE SOUL STORM.
A flood of souls. A collapse so violent it simply paralyzed everyone's minds. People hid behind a wall of forgetting so they wouldn't shatter—an innate protection to existence, perhaps coming from the origin of the levels, from the very foundations of the world, or even from more remote times. No one had the answer. But somehow, the storm didn't cease. On the whole planet, maybe thirty people remember that blackout. That is the only proof we have that it actually happened.
The Deal
Way out at what seemed like the end of the world, Arthur was walking, steadily. Without running, he moved firmly. It was a calm that seemed to contradict the confusion around him. With every step, he felt as if he were pinning the world to the ground, trying to prevent the floor from loosening and collapsing into the rifts of nothingness.
He walked slowly toward an overwhelming pillar of light. It was so absurd it made the sun look like a small lamp ornament, like those Christmas lights. But at the same time, it was pale—a white that seemed to separate and purify all the filth of the world, from creatures to mountains to elements to colors and finally, to every fragment of existence.
"—Thought so," Arthur muttered. His voice was steady and strong, even with the weight of years in his bones. "It's a birth. A beginning. More singular than any other and also more extraordinary."
"You actually showed up, human... Arthur..."
The voice had no throat, though it emitted a sweet and serene sound. It was like the movement of mountains, but it sounded exhausted. Like it had carried the world for a thousand years and finally wanted to let it drop, just to be able to fall asleep and rest, leaving all suffering behind.
"Promises are promises," Arthur said. He stopped in front of the Queen of Beasts. She was a mountain of fur and teeth, extraordinary—a true force of nature and one of the most powerful existences, a legendary creature.
"It's the first time I've seen a human care to fulfill a promise, though I'm sure you have your tricks, terribly tiring and deceptive as you are," she said. Her ears twitched. "It's over for us, humans. My kids are gone. I feel the void where their lives used to be. This light... it emptied them."
"Maybe," Arthur said. "But death is no longer an end at this moment. Don't act like this is a funeral. It's a mess, sure. But it's a change, think about it. Your people haven't vanished, Queen. They've just been somehow re-written."
The Queen's claws scratched the earth. "Are they alive? I mean, alive?"
"I don't know, and lying would kill us both," Arthur said. "But existence is expanding. We're in a new domain or something that resembles it, perhaps even beyond the limits of one and beyond our knowledge."
She looked at the void where her kingdom used to roar. "What choice do I have? The elves are useless and selfish, thinking of their eternal appearance and their forests of endless vitality, despising everyone else; and the demons just want to burn, destroy and kill to show their power and strength, show-off lunatics. I'll follow you. At least we're walking in the same direction and looking at the same end."
The Price
Nebula was sinking. The place wasn't just land; it was an unbelievable beast made of shadows, death, and doom. If you tripped in the wrong spot, it ate you, and nothing but the most terrible and painful of deaths would await you. But now, everything was silent—perhaps for the first time since it existed, the terrible being was not devouring lives at every instant.
On an imposing throne of dragon bone, built from a true dead dragon king, Kalena sat still. She was demon royalty: beautiful enough to kill you, scary enough to make you wish she would. Her horns cut the air like she was listening for ghosts. Her armor was a black hole, except for red veins pulsing like a heart in its last, desperate beat.
Hellfalem stood next to her. Six hundred years of war, and his hand was shaking on her shoulder.
"What is this?" she asked, her voice low.
"I don't know," the warrior growled.
Kalena looked around. Her best warriors were stuck like statues. Mid-drink. Mid-fight. All motionless.
"How long do we have?" Kalena asked.
"Six hours. Maybe less," he said. "Honestly? I think this is it. But you look alive again, Kalena."
She smiled. It was a mean look. "We're the strongest because we face the things nobody dares to face. Today will be no different. We will change ourselves and join this storm. We will become the nightmare. We will match the disgrace that thinks it can consume us."
Hellfalem didn't blink. He roared—a nasty, wet sound—and shoved his fist into his own gut. He tore out his own life: a jagged, pulsing soul core. He was shredding his own soul so his princess could change her race by mixing it with the dark storm.